I’m extremely angry. I’ve been ranting on Twitter; so I thought it might be an idea to write a blog post.
This time last year, across the world, people looked at
their empty city streets and thought “this is the opportunity we’ve been
waiting for to remake our cities for people, not cars”. In the UK, local
councils sprung into action laying down new cycle paths and widening pavements.
Us residents in Edinburgh got a bit restless though.
The Council here have been, slowly, trying to make the city’s
streets better. Though they have good intentions, they still seem to get stuck
with the road traffic engineers’ obsession with “flow” (the disastrous Picardy
Place gyratory, that went from a “cyclist blender” to a horrific two-lane
motor system) and the overly bureaucratic system (the Roseburn to Haymarket
cycleway that’s been stuck in
the statutory consultation system for over a decade). But the Council had
been making some dramatic plans, including basically closing off the city
centre to motor traffic.
Us Edinburgh residents wanted some of their more dramatic
plans to come to fruition. Glasgow – the city that had a new motorway ploughed
through the inner core a decade ago – was even laying out new infrastructure quicker
than Edinburgh. Eventually the Scottish Government got a funding package
together and in May cones started springing-up across the city to make the
streets slightly better places to be with Spaces for People.
Where we used to live – in Leith – it was good. The road
closures due to the tram works, combined with these measures, made the place
really nice to walk around. However, I started to notice something was afoot. As
the first wave of temporary measures were reviewed, I noticed our local measures
– pavement widening on Great Junction Street – were slated for removal. It seemed
that if you were a middle class shopper in Stockbridge and Morningside, then
you deserved space to walk past a queue for the game butchers, or sourdough bakery,
but if you were working class and wanted to walk past a butcher in Leith, then
it didn’t matter if someone coughed the rona all over you.
However, we moved in November 2020 and that’s when I
realised quite how egregious the inequalities in road safety provision in the
city are. We now live in the north east of the city – Pilton to be precise. Our
nearest Spaces for People provisions are the new cycle routes on Ferry Road and
Crewe Road South. Both are really nice and I use them regularly, but essentially
are just cones on existing paint.
We live just off Crewe Road North. It’s a lovely 1930s suburban
avenue, surrounded by four-in-a-block housing, and mansion-style interwar
tenements; a mixture of council tenants and owner-occupation. At the bottom of
the hill there is a nice row of shops. The only pedestrian crossing is at the
southern end of the road to control traffic onto Crewe Toll roundabout. Just
across the road is social housing which is in the 20% most deprived
neighbourhoods in the city.
Not long after moving in, I noticed how fast vehicles shot
down Crewe Road. At the southern end, it narrows under the former railway
bridge so the pavement is only one paving slab wide with a railing alongside.
With the Kent variant of coronavirus surging through the city, if you wanted to
socially distance, you had a choice of stepping into the road and risk
facing-down a HGV travelling over 30mph; wait patiently for another pedestrian
to pass; or don your mask, hold you breathe, and walk quickly while apologising
profusely. We thought the traffic was going quite fast, especially since most
of Edinburgh’s roads are now a 20mph limit. Surely this residential street had
a 20mph limit? And then we spotted the 30 sign.
It got me angry. We’d been living in a very walkable
neighbourhood, but now walking to our local shops was difficult because it felt
very dangerous. I watched the terrified school crossing patrol officers for the
local primary school tentatively step out into the road, just hoping that drivers
would stop. I contacted one of my local councillors with my concerns – asking why
the road wasn’t 20mph and had so few pedestrian crossings. It was passed onto
the Council’s Road Safety Team. They replied that their last survey, in 2019,
showed the average speed was 29 mph, so they didn’t feel a 20mph limit was warranted
(a quick google shows that puts the kids at the local school at seven times the
risk of being killed by a driver) and the same survey showed that very few
pedestrian cross the road. I replied pointing out that this was no surprise –
as a fit and healthy young man, I find it difficult to cross the road safely.
The reply to that (which I eventually got after chasing) just fobbed me off
into a bureaucratic process of the review of the 20mph limit that will happen
some time in the future.
And then I started getting out-and-about in the city again.
I noticed in Barnton, on a very quiet suburban road, where the house price is
basically the phone number with a pound sign in front of it, there were some
lovely Spaces for People cones out widening a very wide pavement. Meanwhile I
was stepping out into the road to walk past people waiting for a bus. In the
New Town, there was a quiet residential street which didn’t have a pavement on
one side because that was where the shared private garden was, and in the early-nineteenth
century you didn’t need pavements to save yourself from being killed by a Range
Rover. I noticed there were some lovely Spaces for People cones marking out access
to the private garden. Meanwhile, tenants of the Council’s housing don’t
have safe access to the Council’s schools.
Frustrated by this visible inequity, I popped in an access
to environmental information request, asking for details of how the Spaces for
People provision was distributed across the city according to deprivation. It
got rejected because the information was already in the public domain. The
Council expected me to sit with a map of the hundreds of datazones in Edinburgh
and plot on the Spaces for People provision myself. I have appealed this
decision, pointing out they can do this with a couple of clicks of GIS.
And this all just leaves me angry. It has been known for decades
that children in deprived neighbourhoods are far more likely to be killed by
drivers. And I’m using active language because I loathe the passive language of
driverless cars accidentally mowing down vulnerable pedestrians. It really
feels like Edinburgh Council just do not care about the safety of residents in
deprived neighbourhoods. Because our houses are worth less, so are our lives.
My research has focused on middle class activism, so I know a lot of
this is down to the active, able communities in these neighbourhoods campaigning
for improvements. But it is also down to officers and councillors just not
caring, or thinking, about deprived neighbourhoods. They should have actively
suggested improvements in these neighbourhoods, not wait for residents (who are
probably rather busy dealing with losing their jobs to worry) to respond to a
consultation. Given this is a brilliant opportunity to make our roads safer
temporarily, we should not be forced to have to wait until a review in the
future to make our lives safer. Unless Edinburgh Council want poor kids to die.